Afrika Reich [Paperback]

Reading The Afrika Reich is a abit like watching a movie made from elements of James Bond, Schindler's List, and Die Hard.

A shady businessman hires a crack team of mercenaries to assassinate the Governor General of the German Africa territories, Walter E. Hochburg, and their leader Burton has a personal score to settle with the man. They aparently succeed in killing their targetm but from there on everything goes wrong for the group, and one by one the members of the group are hunted down until only the old comrades Whaler and Burton remain, both veterans of the Foreign Legion. And now they have to slip out of thousands of squaremiles of SS-controlled Africa...

The Afrika Reich presents the reader with a steady stream of action in an alien and yet familiar world of a 1950s Africa where the Black population has almost completely vanished, shipped off to the so-called Muspel zone in the Sahara.
The enemy is evil, over the top evil in a mustache-twirling way befitting of that fine best spy of Her Majesty's secret service. In the same way, he truly is as gutwrenchingly, unflinchingly evil as he is in the character of Amon Goeth in Schindler's List. Walter E. Hochburg is Saville's Goeth. Nearly everything screams of psychotic megalomania.

The Germans themselves - except for Field Marshal von Arnim - are all ugly or brutish, and going by Saville's description, all the people in The Afrika Reich seem to eat are sausages, sauerkraut and strudel, the "holy trinity of German cuisines". Considering the immense variety of German foods (and the actually limited number of dishes I know that contain either sausages or sauerkraut), that's like saying British cuisine consists of plum pudding and fish'n'chips.

And then there's the Die Hard aspect: that of the hero(es) who, no matter the pain and injury inflicted, can get out of his cuffs and into the fight again, for what feels like a dozen times throughout the book.

Which is one or two times to many, in my opinion. During the beginning of last third, the book drags considerably. Here, Saville could have cut 50 pages with no great loss to the integrity of the central plot itself, or better, used them to expand on the revelations of that very last part.

The alternate history aspect is well-employed, taken as a matter of fact of how the world works. I feel this worked to the novel's advantage; delving deeper into the coming about of such backgrounds only opens the gates wide for doubts (like: where's the manpower just to control things there coming from).

Some of the more cartoonish aspects of The Afrika Reich can be put down to an extrapolation of Himmler's schemes and the relative independence of Hochburg's Africa, but on the whole one gets the impression that there's really no reason why any sane German or European would want to live in The Afrika Reich, not with the pervasive presence of jackbooting thugs liable to ruin your day just because they think they can.

Final Verdict: 3.5-4 out of 5. All in all, The Afrika Reich is an entertaining first novel, both for Saville and for his planned trilogy. It doesn't question its setup and rolls with the flow, presenting the reader with non-stop action of heroes possessing over-the-top endurance, and with villains that'd put Blofeld to shame.

fast paced and written to keep you at the edge of your seat! i was expected more historical and political elements - this was not as similar to fatherland as was implied by the back of the book. that said, it was very well done! gory and often unflinching in its portraying of the capacity for evil that exists in this world. the power of friendship and love shine through even on the darkest continent. very well done!

This is an extraordinarily well-written book set in an alternate-history Nazi-occupied Africa in the 1950s. Not only is it intricately and believably plotted, but it races along, constantly raising the tension with unexpected twists at every turn. The characters are developed and credible, the dialogue is likewise believable and the world of an Afrika Reich is realistically created -- and it is a brutal place. Savile deserves great credit for seemingly having gone out of his way to avoid cliches in his characters. Although reminiscent of both early Frederick Forsyth and Joseph Conrad (as well as the movie Apocalypse Now), this is an original work that stands on its own. This is easily one of the best thrillers to come out for many years and I recommend it without reservation. It is a tragedy that it is not available in U.S. bookstores.

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